A new study from the School of Medical Sciences at Australia’s University of New South Wales points to profound brain changes that junk food causes, making a junk food habit “more deadly than war, famine, and genocide”. “We observed that rats fed a cafeteria diet for 2 weeks showed impaired sensory-specific satiety following consumption of a high calorie solution. The deficit in expression of sensory-specific satiety was also present 1 week following the withdrawal of cafeteria foods. Thus, exposure to obesogenic diets may impact upon neurocircuitry involved in motivated control of behavior.” "the consumption of junk food overrides this natural...

Thanks to the Washington Post, we have new entry in what is surely the fastest-growing industry in academia: bogus studies that purport to show there is no difference between black and white rates of crime. The only difference comes from the big bad racist police, prosecutors, parole officers, judges, juries, reporters, editors and others who are also in on The Big Fix and relentlessly pick on black people, For No Reason What So Ever. Even in black cities with black mayors, black police chiefs and black prosecutors -- like Washington. ThisÂ latest headline from the Post tells a shocking story:...

CARSON CITY — A retirement system official said Thursday a report showing that some public employees who retire collect more in pension benefits than they did while working was based on less than 2 percent of beneficiaries. The analysis also does not reflect changes to the retirement plan made in 1985 that reduced pension payouts, said Tina Leiss, executive officer of the system. The conclusions in the report issued by the Nevada Policy Research Institute, a conservative think tank based in Las Vegas, do not account for the vast majority of the members and retirees of the Public Employees’ Retirement...

CARSON CITY — Most people who make the decision to retire have to figure out how to live on fewer dollars, but that is not always the case with Nevada state and local government employees, a new analysis has found. The analysis by the conservative think tank Nevada Policy Research Institute, using newly available public data provided by the Public Employees Retirement System, shows that many public sector retirees actually receive a raise upon retirement. The analysis, which looked at 10 of Nevada’s largest government agencies, including the state of Nevada, Las Vegas, Clark County and the Clark County School...

Experimental mice have been telling us this for years, but pot-smoking humans didn't want to believe it could happen to them: Compared with a person who never smoked marijuana, someone who uses marijuana regularly has, on average, less gray matter in his orbital frontal cortex, a region that is a key node in the brain's reward, motivation, decision-making and addictive behaviors network. More ambiguously, in regular pot smokers, that region is better connected than it is in non-users:The flow of signal traffic is speedier to other parts of that motivation and decision-making network, including across the superhighway of "white matter"...

The Obama administration has funded a new study by top consulting firm RAND Health that startlingly finds that if taxpayer subsidies are eliminated, Obamacare exchanges will fall into a “death spiral.” The study comes in the wake of a number of lawsuits which are challenging the Obama administration’s implementation of Obamacare subsidies. Three lawsuits have made it to U.S. Circuit Courts, just one step from the Supreme Court, arguing that the text of the Affordable Care Act allows premium subsidies for state-run exchanges only. (RELATED: Second Court Strikes Down Obamacare Subsidies In Federal Exchanges) The report was sponsored by HHS’s...

Three recent cases of bear attack in Wyoming illustrate the flaws in studies purporting to show that bear spray is superior to firearms as a defense against bears. On September 20th, 2014 the following incident occurred. From county10.com: (Dubois, Wyo.) – The Wyoming Game and Fish Department and the U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service both confirmed today that a third bear incident occurred this past weekend, on Saturday in northwestern Fremont County. In this incident, Lander Large Carnivore Specialist Brian DeBolt said a Grizzly bear was shot and killed “in an act of self defense” in the East...

The final report from a landmark federal study on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, found no evidence that chemicals or brine water from the gas drilling process moved upward to contaminate drinking water at a site in western Pennsylvania. The Department of Energy report, released Monday, was the first time an energy company allowed independent monitoring of a drilling site during the fracking process and for 18 months afterward. After those months of monitoring, researchers found that the chemical-laced fluids used to free gas stayed about 5,000 feet below drinking water supplies. Scientists used tracer fluids, seismic monitoring, and other tests...

How many Jews were aboard the Titanic before it sank? This question will likely forever remain unanswered. "According to the White Star Line company's list, there were several hundred Jews onboard," says Eli Moskowitz, who studied the story of the Jewish passengers on the most famous ship in history, which sank 102 years ago, claiming the lives of 1,517 people. "Some of them were in first-class cabins, but most were in the third class which was reserved for immigrants, and where men had the lowest chances of surviving. The exact number of Jews in the third class is still unknown."

Following rapid warming in the late 20th century, this century has so far seen surprisingly little increase in the average temperature at the Earth’s surface. At first this was a blip, then a trend, then a puzzle for the climate science community. More than a dozen theories have now been proposed for the so-called global warming hiatus, ranging from air pollution to volcanoes to sunspots. New research from the University of Washington shows that the heat absent from the surface is plunging deep in the north and south Atlantic Ocean, and is part of a naturally occurring cycle. The study...

People living in countries with governments that spend more on social services report being more contented, according to a Baylor University study. "The effect of state intervention into the economy equals or exceeds marriage or employment status -- two traditional predictors of happiness -- when it comes to satisfaction," said Patrick Flavin, Ph.D., assistant professor of political science in Baylor's College of Arts & Sciences. The study -- "Assessing the Impact of the Size and Scope of Government on Human Well-Being" -- is published in the journal Social Forces. The researchers analyzed data from 21 advanced industrialized countries in the...

If unemployment benefits were cut off earlier in 2013, the long-term unemployed would have been more likely to be re-employed, according to a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. If the benefits, called the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program, expired earlier in 2013, “workers with 46 or more weeks of continuous unemployment would have been 1.2 to 2.1 percentage points more likely to become re-employed,” the St. Louis Fed reported. “Similarly, the long-term unemployed would have been 0.4 to 0.5 percentage points more likely to exit the labor force entirely.”

Two major national anti-obesity campaigns supported by first lady Michelle Obama and former President Clinton treat overweight Americans as “idiots” too dumb to figure out what's good for them, according to a new academic study.Worse, said the study from a George Washington University professor, the Obama-backed Partnership for a Healthier America and Clinton supported Alliance for a Healthier Generation blame consumers and not the makers of unhealthy food for the obesity epidemic.“I found that these organizations might more appropriately be called the ‘Partnership for a Healthier Bottom Line,' ” said associate sociologist professor Ivy Ken in the influential academic journal...

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) — Biofuels made from the leftovers of harvested corn plants are worse than gasoline for global warming in the short term, a study shows, challenging the Obama administration's conclusions that they are a much cleaner oil alternative and will help combat climate change.</p>

Submitted by Mike Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg blog, Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts. Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened. - From a recent...

In a recent paper, Lubinski and his colleagues caught up with one cohort of 320 people now in their late 30s. At 12, their SAT math or verbal scores had placed them among the top one-100th of 1 percent. Today, many are CEOs, professors at top research universities, transplant surgeons, and successful novelists. That outcome sounds like exactly what you’d imagine should happen: Top young people grow into high-achieving adults. In the education world, the study has provided important new evidence that it really is possible to identify the kids who are likely to become exceptional achievers in the future,...

If you were reading me in January, you might remember how shocked I was by a claim (one of many false claims) that President Barack Obama made in his state of the union speech. I wrote, “If The President Can Credit Michelle Obama With Lowering Childhood Obesity, Then He can Get Away With Anything.”

A new report funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation casts "serious doubt" on efforts by nanny state legislators to curb obesity through tax increases on sweet sodas and energy drinks, finding in some cases that people simply shift to other sweets — and gain weight."Our results cast serious doubt on the assumptions that proponents of large soda taxes make on its likely impacts on population weight," said the report from three health economic experts. "Together with evidence of important substitution patterns in response to soda taxes that offset any caloric reductions in soda consumption, our results suggest that fundamental...

(CNSNews.com) – The National Science Foundation has awarded a $356,337 grant to the University of Iowa to use virtual technology to study social influences on risky cycling and pedestrian behavior. “This project will create a simulation facility that will advance a capability to study the social interactions of two children, or a child and parent, as the two people walk or bicycle across a traffic-filled roadway,” the grant announcement said. It will “expand existing infrastructure” at the university “to build a new simulator that matches a recently installed simulator at the same institution, which will permit each of two experimental...

<p>Governments could slow or even reverse the growing obesity epidemic if they introduced more regulation into the global market for fast foods such as burgers, chips and fizzy drinks, researchers said on Monday.</p>
<p>A study published in the Bulletin of the World Health Organization (WHO) suggested that if governments took firmer action, they could start to prevent people becoming overweight and obese - conditions with serious long-term consequences such as diabetes, heart diseases and cancer.</p>

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni today released a report that finds the country’s most prestigious liberal arts colleges fail to live up to their reputations in several crucial areas of academic quality and campus management. Many have failed to restrain administrative bloat and high spending, few provide a solid foundation of core courses, and most severely restrict free speech on campus. And all the while, Great Recession notwithstanding, the sticker price of tuition has continued to climb sharply upward. The report, Education or Reputation?: A Look at America's Top-Ranked Liberal Arts Colleges, examined 29 institutions—nationally ranked as the...

A study published in the latest issue of the academic journal Applied Economics Letters took on many of the claims made regularly by advocates of stricter gun laws. The study determined that nearly every claim made in support of stronger restrictions on gun ownership is not supported by an exhaustive analysis of crime statistics. The study, “An examination of the effects of concealed weapons laws and assault weapons bans on state-level murder rates,” conducted by Quinnipiac University economist Mark Gius, examined nearly 30 years of statistics and concluded that stricter gun laws do not result in a reduction in gun...

Earth may be unlivable by 2050 or 2100 because of the rapid increase in global warming and climate change. According to Opednews.com, an article by Dahr Jamail makes it clear that climate change is accelerating so much that eartch will probably be unlivable by 2100, if not 2050. "The global warming that was previously predicted to occur within 2,000 years, is now predicted to occur within the lifetimes of some people who are alive even today," the website said. It continued:

Quinnipiac University economist Mark Gius has published a new study, "An examination of the effects of concealed weapons laws and assault weapons bans on state-level murder rates," in the journal Applied Economics Letters. From the abstract: The purpose of the present study is to determine the effects of state-level assault weapons bans and concealed weapons laws on state-level murder rates. Using data for the period 1980 to 2009 and controlling for state and year fixed effects, the results of the present study suggest that states with restrictions on the carrying of concealed weapons had higher gun-related murder rates than other...

Fudan University in Shanghai is to study China's historical figures such as Confucius and the early emperors through modern DNA technology, Beijing Times reports. The studies follow the latest findings published on Monday on Cao Cao, a warlord who lived nearly 2,000 years ago in final years of the Eastern Han Dynasty. It debunked rumors that Cao's father Cao Song was fostered by comparing the DNA of Cao's living descendents and that found in the teeth of Cao's grandfather. Han Sheng from Fudan University, who led the Cao Cao research, says it is a breakthrough in the fields of both...

LINCOLN, NE (CBS) – A new study has confirmed something women have been complaining about for years. The research, out of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and published in the Springer-published journal Sex Roles, essentially corroborates the belief that people tend to focus more on the breasts and figure of a woman when analyzing her appearance than they do on her face. According to researchers, the study was the first ever to use eye-tracking technology to examine the glances of men when the “ogle” or “check out” women, whereas previous research had used only women’s self-reported experiences. After monitoring how the...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - More than half of low-wage workers employed by the largest U.S. fast-food restaurants earn so little that they must rely on public assistance to get by, according to a study released on Tuesday. This ends up costing U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars a year, the study said. Data from the U.S. Census Bureau and public benefit programs show 52 percent of fast-food cooks, cashiers and other "front-line" staff had relied on at least one form of public assistance, such as Medicaid, food stamps and the Earned Income Tax Credit program, between 2007 and 2011, researchers at...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Starting in about a decade, Kingston, Jamaica, will probably be off-the-charts hot — permanently. Other places will soon follow. Singapore in 2028. Mexico City in 2031. Cairo in 2036. Phoenix and Honolulu in 2043. And eventually the whole world in 2047. A new study on global warming pinpoints the probable dates for when cities and ecosystems around the world will regularly experience hotter environments the likes of which they have never seen before. And for dozens of cities, mostly in the tropics, those dates are a generation or less away. "This paper is both innovative and sobering,"...

The Center for Budget and Policy Priorities has released its latest report on state funding for schools, and claims that Michigan is spending 9 percent less on schools than it was in 2008. The report, however, ignores billions of dollars, a major flaw that Mackinac Center for Public Policy experts identified last year. In its analysis of school spending for 2007-08, CBPP left out about $10 billion in education funding, including $6 billion in revenue from property taxes and $1.4 billion in special education money. CBPP's report is especially meaningless for Michigan because of the way the state foundation allowance...

Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy has just released a study of the relative effects of stringent gun laws. They found that a country like Luxenbourg, which bans all guns has a murder rate that is 9 times higher than Germany, where there are 30,000 guns per 100,000 people. They also cited a study by the U.S.National Academy of Sciences, which studied 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government publications, and it failed to find one gun control initiative that worked. In fact, in many cases it found that violence is very often lower, where guns are more readily...

Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy has just released a study of the relative effects of stringent gun laws. They found that a country like Luxenbourg, which bans all guns has a murder rate that is 9 times higher than Germany, where there are 30,000 guns per 100,000 people. They also cited a study by the U.S.National Academy of Sciences, which studied 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government publications, and it failed to find one gun control initiative that worked. In fact, in many cases it found that violence is very often lower, where guns are more readily...

WASHINGTON (AP) — A new government study says that federal health care and retirement programs threaten to overwhelm the federal budget and harm the economy in coming decades unless Washington finds the political will to restrain their inexorable growth. The long-term pressures promise to quickly reverse recent improvements in the deficit. Tuesday's Congressional Budget Office report says that government spending on health care and Social Security would double relative to the size of the economy in 25 years and that spending on other programs like defense, transportation and education would decline to its smallest level by the same measure since...

WASHINGTON (AP) — Drilling and fracking for natural gas don't seem to spew immense amounts of the greenhouse gas methane into the air, as has been feared, a new study says. The findings bolster a big selling point for natural gas, that it's not as bad for global warming as coal. And they undercut a major environmental argument against fracking, a process that breaks apart deep rock to recover more gas. The study, mostly funded by energy interests, doesn't address other fracking concerns about potential air and water pollution. The results, which generally agree with earlier Environmental Protection Agency estimates,...

“The study of antisemitism,” admits Bruno Chaouat, a professor of French in Minnesota, “can be tedious.” This admirably candid confession appears relatively early in the pages of Resurgent Antisemitism: Global Perspectives, a collection of nineteen new essays edited by Alvin H. Rosenfeld, the distinguished director of Indiana University’s Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and author of several major books about the Holocaust. Chaouat is right, of course: while a single anecdote about irrational hate can breed sorrow, anger, and/or shock, a thick book consisting entirely of such material is more likely to be, quite simply, numbing. It is...

Boys with sisters are more likely to be 'sexist and Republican because they are never made to cook or clean' research claims Having only female siblings makes boys more likely be Republicans as adults, new research claims. Professors from Loyola Marymount University and Stanford University analyzed surveys completed by more than 3,000 individuals when they were aged ten plus in 1987 and again a decade later. They concluded that men in their 20s and 30s who grew up with sisters and no brothers were 8.3per cent more likely to identify as Republican because they developed 'more traditional views of gender'.

A recent NASA report throws the space agency into conflict with its climatologists after new NASA measurements prove that carbon dioxide acts as a coolant in Earth's atmosphere. NASA's Langley Research Center has collated data proving that “greenhouse gases” actually block up to 95 percent of harmful solar rays from reaching our planet, thus reducing the heating impact of the sun. The data was collected by Sounding of the Atmosphere using Broadband Emission Radiometry, (or SABER). SABER monitors infrared emissions from Earth’s upper atmosphere, in particular from carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitric oxide (NO), two substances thought to be playing...

Large swaths of the Arctic tundra will be warm enough to support lush vegetation and trees by 2050, suggests a new study. Higher temperatures will lessen snow cover, according to the study, which is detailed in the March 31 issue of the journal Nature Climate Change. That, in turn, will decrease the sunlight reflected back into the atmosphere and increase warming. About half the areas will see vegetation change, and areas currently populated by shrubs may find woody trees taking their place. "Substitute the snowy surface with the darker surface of a coniferous tree, and the darker surface stores more...

ORLANDO, Florida (Reuters) - A national survey found 301,874 "zombie" properties dotting the U.S. landscape in which homeowners in foreclosure have moved out, leaving vacant property susceptible to vandalism and degradation. Florida tops the list of zombie properties with 90,556 vacant homes in foreclosure, according to a foreclosure inventory released on Thursday by RealtyTrac, a real estate information company in Irvine, California. Illinois and California ranked a distant second and third with 31,668 and 28,821 zombie properties respectively on the list. The number of homes overall in foreclosure or bank-owned rose by 9 percent to 1.5 million properties nationally in...

In its first three years, President Obama's healthcare law has imposed more than $30 billion in costs and 111 million hours of paperwork burdens, according to a new study from the American Action Forum. The forum, a conservative think tank led by former Congressional Budget Office Director Douglas Holtz-Eakin, said the law will raise premiums and hurt small businesses. "The macro figures, $30.8 billion in costs and 111 million hours, might give policymakers some concern, but the real impact is how these figures affect the healthcare market, consumers, and small businesses," the report said. Some provisions of the law are...

On the heels of a study linking sugary drinks to 25,000 U.S. deaths a year, new research suggests salty food is even more dangerous.The new study, by the same Harvard research team, linked excessive salt consumption to nearly 2.3 million cardiovascular deaths worldwide in 2010. One in 10 Americans dies from eating too much salt, the researchers found.â€śThe burden of sodium is much higher than the burden of sugar-sweetened beverages,â€ť said Dr. Dariush Mozaffarian, an epidemiologist at the Harvard School of Public Health and author of both the salt and sugary drink studies. â€śThatâ€™s because sugar-sweetened beverages are just one...

Harvard medical researchers just published a scholarly paper in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, claiming that more firearm laws in a state are associated with a lower rate of gun homicides and suicides. However, examination of their data and research methods shows the opposite. McMaster University researcher Caillin Langmann, MD, PhD noted that the Harvard authors’ own best analysis: * Does not show that states with more gun laws have fewer gun deaths * Demonstrates that “assault weapon” bans have no effect on homicide * Demonstrates that laws prohibiting guns in public places have no effect on homicide Even more...

The country’s largest trade group for drones on Tuesday released a study that says the unmanned vehicle industry could create 70,000 jobs in the United States over the next three years and add $14 billion to the economy. The Association of Unmanned Vehicles Systems International (AUVSI), which commissioned the study, went one further and predicted the industry could produce more than 100,000 jobs by 2025 with an estimated economic impact of $82 billion. “This is an incredibly exciting time for an industry developing technology that will benefit society, as well as the economy,” said Michael Toscano, president & CEO of...

Among the 23 “executive actions” President Obama announced yesterday amidst great fanfare (and shameless exploitation of children) is this: “Issue a Presidential Memorandum directing the Centers for Disease Control to research the causes and prevention of gun violence.” Obama may want to put a hold on that one, until he comes to grips with what happened the last time a U.S. president tried it.

In a paper published in 2008, comparing highly regulated Californian gun shows with relatively unregulated Texas gun shows, there was no statistical difference in suicide rates, but the Texas shows, with far less regulation, showed a statistically significant drop in the homicide rate. From the study: "But our results provide little evidence of a gun show-induced increase in mortality in Texas. In fact, we find that in the two weeks following a gun show, the average number of gun homicides declines in the area surrounding the gun show. Aggregating across all gun shows in the state, we find that there...

One of the recommendations of Vatican II was that priests be formed in the arts: “During their philosophical and theological studies, clerics are to be taught about the history and development of sacred art, and about the sound principles governing the production of its works. In consequence they will be able to appreciate and preserve the Church’s venerable monuments, and be in a position to aid, by good advice, artists who are engaged in producing works of art” (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 129). This is not a bad idea, considering that priests are the caretakers of the Church’s artistic patrimony. Each pastor...

WASHINGTON - The Intercounty Connector, a highway that stretches between Gaithersburg and Laurel in Maryland, could see an increase in its speed limit this year. An engineering study found the speed limit of the highway could be raised from its current limit of 55 mph to 60 mph. The ICC, which opened in 2011, gives commuters a quick way to get from Interstate 270 to Interstate 95. "We wanted to have one year of actual operating experience before we looked at speed limits at all," Maryland Transportation Authority Executive Secretary Harold M. Bartlett tells WTOP. Bartlett says he thinks there...

SOUTH AUSTRALIA, Australia (CBSDC) – Researchers at the University of Adelaide in Australia have found another purpose for mistletoe – apart from helping potential suitors steal kisses around the holidays. Mistletoe could also be used to help the effectiveness of chemotherapy, or could even act as an alternative to chemotherapy for treatment of colon cancer, according to Newswise. The American Institute for Cancer Research in Washington, D.C. noted on its official website that colorectal cancers are preventable – as many as 45 percent of occurrences could be curbed with dietary and habit modifications. Despite that fact, the news of a...